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Why Python is Important for You

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Re: Why Python is Important for You

#71

Post by tripzilch »

wging wrote: post #11

As a commenter on the article wrote: what about Ruby? I say this as a happy Python user. Ruby seems very similar but I'm reminded of a pg essay on language power: looking up the power curve, you see '$Language plus a bit of weird stuff that is probably irrelevant.' So I don't trust myself. As someone who loves Python and doesn't know any Ruby beyond a few bits of syntax and the obvious bits that are common to most la…

Some many years ago I decided I should learn a new scripting language because PHP wasn't general-purpose enough. I decided it would be either Python, Ruby or Perl. For some reason Perl was dropped early, I forget why (don't worry I learned some Perl later).

So I started Googling for Python vs Ruby. After checking some language basics tutorials, I decided that really, for my purposes they were about equivalent in power (didn't know much about library support yet).

The one thing that pushed me towards Python was that most articles I could find comparing Ruby and Python were written by a happy user of one of these languages. However, all Python users wrote something like "I guess you can do everything in either of them, it's just a matter of preference and I happen to have picked Python", while the Ruby users tended to be somewhat more flaming and arrogant about it, especially in the comments sections.

In the end I went with Python because the community seemed more friendly. However, I stayed for the library support. Especially after that one time I installed pyTwitter and I could just do `import twitter`, I was pretty impressed by that (I assume Ruby has an excellent Twitter lib too, btw).

Also, just a little disclaimer: This was a couple of years back (I forget how many, 5 or so) maybe the Ruby community changed, and it's also totally possible that I just happened to land on a rather "particular" region of the Ruby blogosphere, so take this cum grano salis. I had to make a choice and was about this close to just flipping a coin over it :)

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#72

Post by jshen »

masklinn wrote: post #70
jshen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also say that ruby has done a better job of moving forward. Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. I think JRuby is more mature than jpython, and I know this will start the flames, but I think ruby is clearly better for web stuff; not just rails, but the whole ecosystem. Edit: I also think bundler is better than what is going on in python land.

> Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. They're not comparable, so no. > I think JRuby is more mature than jpython Pretty different situations, from 2006 to 2009 two lead JRuby developers were hired specifically for that by Sun (later left for EngineYard) and a third was hired by ThoughtWorks for the same. For Jython this only happened in 2008, after the project had pretty much gone on freeze due to the original founder leav…

You dodged the first two issues. Python 3 is causing serious pain, does django work with it yet?

Second, who cares why JRuby is more mature, it is.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#73

Post by masklinn »

Peaker wrote: post #61

"Weirder languages (e.g: Haskell)" sounds like something a Blub programmer would say. How is Haskell "weird"? I've used Python for many years, but only recently have I migrated my last Python niche (simple scripts) from Python to Haskell. I've found that even there, Haskell has become more productive.

> How is Haskell "weird"?

Functional the world (of wide-spread computing languages) is imperative, lazy the world is eager, objects-less when the world is object-oriented, curried when the world is uncurried, pattern-matched when the world is conditional and brings up "strange" concepts from mathematical bowels like "monads", "functors" or "zippers" when the world barely iterates on arrays.

How is Haskell not weird from the point of view of 99% of the developers population? Knowing, liking or using Haskell is not even relevant there, Haskell is weird because it is an alien to the majority in the same way Smalltalk, Erlang or Clojure are weird (but for different reasons, for the most part).

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#74

Post by nostrademons »

rmcclellan wrote: post #15
Luyt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find a great way to avoid deep nesting is to move code to functions, and bail out when some conditions are not met. As an example, this deeply nested code: def frob(someargs): if something > 2: ... # do some processing if that == "CONNECT": ... # some more processing if verdict in blessedsolutions: ... # even more processing print "Happy birthday!" I tend to write like this: def frob(someargs): if something I do th…

Neither solution is great. Excessive use of return and continue is an incredibly fast way of making code completely incomprehensible. Such complicated control flows should be treated as a major, fundamental problem. Keeping them in place will cause bugs and prevent future contributors from having confidence that their changes are correct. The problem of complicated control flow is too deep to be solved with a band-ai…

It works fine as long as the early returns are for error-checking or default values. Generally, you want each function to do one thing and do it well; one very effective way to structure this is to bail out early if that one thing can't be accomplished, and then have the body of the function actually do it.

If the actual logic requires many branching paths, then usually I'd reach for a more structured solution like a chain-of-responsibility pattern, fanout, or FSM. Also, you can get pretty far with a bunch of predicate functions composed together with 'and'.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#75

Post by ajankovic »

Peaker wrote: post #61

"Weirder languages (e.g: Haskell)" sounds like something a Blub programmer would say. How is Haskell "weird"? I've used Python for many years, but only recently have I migrated my last Python niche (simple scripts) from Python to Haskell. I've found that even there, Haskell has become more productive.

I believe that sentence was meant to be a joke by addressing common generalizations about other languages.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#76

Post by Peaker »

masklinn wrote: post #73
Peaker wrote: post #61

"Weirder languages (e.g: Haskell)" sounds like something a Blub programmer would say. How is Haskell "weird"? I've used Python for many years, but only recently have I migrated my last Python niche (simple scripts) from Python to Haskell. I've found that even there, Haskell has become more productive.

> How is Haskell "weird"? Functional the world (of wide-spread computing languages) is imperative, lazy the world is eager, objects-less when the world is object-oriented, curried when the world is uncurried, pattern-matched when the world is conditional and brings up "strange" concepts from mathematical bowels like "monads", "functors" or "zippers" when the world barely iterates on arrays. How is Haskell not weird f…

I understand "different". Not "weird".

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#77

Post by masklinn »

Peaker wrote: post #76
masklinn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is Haskell "weird"? Functional the world (of wide-spread computing languages) is imperative, lazy the world is eager, objects-less when the world is object-oriented, curried when the world is uncurried, pattern-matched when the world is conditional and brings up "strange" concepts from mathematical bowels like "monads", "functors" or "zippers" when the world barely iterates on arrays. How is Haskell not weird f…

I understand "different". Not "weird".

They reify to the same thing, something different looks weird, and something weird is different.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#78

Post by icebraining »

jtchang wrote: post #4

I work with python daily. I find that when I first started I avoid a lot of the "fancy" constructs such as list comprehensions, dynamic arguments, and decorators as well as meta programming. The great thing is the bar to being effective in the language is so low. You can pretty much pick up most python code and just read it and get a general feel for what it does. Not only that but it is much easier to read because o…

If there are lots of indents like 5 or 6 levels deep I know something is wrong.

"Flat is better than nested"

I keep a print-out of PEP-20 above my desk. It serves as an incentive to clean up my messy code ;)

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#79

Post by jshen »

Daishiman wrote: post #65
jshen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also say that ruby has done a better job of moving forward. Compare ruby 1.9 to python 3. I think JRuby is more mature than jpython, and I know this will start the flames, but I think ruby is clearly better for web stuff; not just rails, but the whole ecosystem. Edit: I also think bundler is better than what is going on in python land.

I would say that the policy of rapid movement it has its ups and downsides; Python code is generally very stable between versions and breakage is well-documented. So far I haven't seen the same thing going on in Ruby land. JRuby is clearly more advanced that Jython. I'm guessing that with the advance of PyPy, other Python interpreters just aren't getting that much attention, which is a bit unfortunate.

rapid movement definitely has it's downsides. However, I don't know what you mean when you say that ruby code isn't stable between versions. Do you mean between versions of ruby? If so, again, the transition from ruby 1.8 to ruby 1.9 was much much better than the transition from python 2 to python 3.

Re: Why Python is Important for You

#80

Post by dcosson »

loxs wrote: post #54
shazow wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It varies. When I was helping @limedaring learn Python, I'd read source with her and explain what it does. Quite often I'd feel somewhat embarrassed when explaining what a line does by verbatim reading what it says. "for user in users: ..." "if user.is_admin: ..." It was especially nice that the topic of "what code block does this condition apply to?" did not even occur to either of us. The indentation-based blocks m…

IMHO, decorators, although very useful are a big departure away from python's "simplicity" in syntax. I remember having lots of headaches several years ago wile trying to fit it in my brain. Even after I realized it is something as simple as JavaScript's myfun(fun(){}), my brain somehow continued denying to absorb it.

Agreed that they can be tricky initially and hard to debug, but I think they're totally worth it for eliminating repetitive code. And IMO as long as there isn't a bug in the decorator itself, code with decorators can be just as readable (if not more so) to someone else (e.g. decorating your functions with @authenticated instead of if self.user.is_authenticated: # blah, blah blah)
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